A CROSSOVER MISCELLANY PT. 2

Another type of doppelganger that cannot be deemed a "template deviation" and so qualifies rather as a "derivative," would be the "replacement character." All of these doppelgangers are always diegetically distinct from whatever character they replace, as opposed, say, to being "retconned" as distinct individuals. The 1950s version of Captain America was not a replacement, since the original idea of the writer was that Cap and his pal Bucky were just slightly older versions of the WWII heroes. A later retcon then claimed that these costumed crusaders were distinct from Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes, which clearly was not the original intent.

In the Golden Age, it was rare for a writer to bother having a new version of a character replace another. Often, as I noted in THE THREE CAMILLAS, a creator would just try out different versions of a same-name series-star, barely if at all caring that this played merry hob with "continuity." 

A rare Golden Age example of an overt replacement occurred in the magazine PRIZE COMICS. In the first issue of PRIZE, playboy Doug Danville elected to play superhero, first using the forgettable name "K the Unknown" for his debut, and then changing it for the next thirty-something adventures to "The Black Owl." In issue #13, the magazine introduced the juvenile twin-heroes "Yank and Doodle," whose father Walt Walters was not aware of their double identities. Then in issue #34, someone decided to jettison Doug Danville and to have Walt Walters take over as The Black Owl. This allowed for a little melodrama as the father-hero sometimes crossed over into the adventures of his sons, and vice versa, without the kids knowing who the new Black Owl actually was. I imagine, though, that after a short time the young PRIZE readers probably forgot that there ever was a Danville version of this owlish hero.

In the Silver Age, it was common for villains to be be endlessly recycled, and barely any super-crooks ever succumbed to either imprisonment or death, no matter how seemingly irreversible. A notable exception, though, was the Lee-Kirby creation The Molecule Man. Despite making a powerful debut in FANTASTIC FOUR #20, neither his creators nor anyone else rescued him from his fate at the end of the story: that of being exiled to another world by the heroes' friend The Watcher.

A replacement version, however, showed up in 1974, for the debut issue of MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE. Writer Steve Gerber showed readers the previously undisclosed fate of the villain, first seen dying on an alien world and charging his unnamed son to take over his mission to gain vengeance on his old foes, the Fantastic Four. To the best of my knowledge, this is substantially the only Molecule Man extant at Marvel.

Why didn't Gerber decide to simply revive the original malefactor? I theorize it's because he wanted a new angle on a rather colorless original. After Molecule Man Two duplicates the experiment that gave his late father his molecule-altering abilities, he travels to the Earth-plane. However, once he gets there, he finds that because he grew up in a different time-continuum, on Earth he ages rapidly when he doesn't have his wand to replenish his body. This makes for a stirring conclusion when he fights both the Thing and the Man-Thing, and the former hero deprives the villain of his revival-tool.

Molecule Man Two survived his temporary death in the approved comics-fashion and went on to other adventures, and without checking, I assume that the aging-on-Earth angle was quickly dropped. But his relevance to my idea of replacement characters is to ask what if any "cosmic alignment" he had, according to the principles I laid down in this essay. The original Molecule Man was aligned with the Fantastic Four, and no one else. But though his replacement goes looking for The Thing to satisfy his father's grudge, Molecule Man Two is not his father, and so he's not any more aligned to The Thing-- who he meets for the first time in his debut-- than to The Man-Thing. In the long run, Molecule Man Two didn't end up being aligned with any hero in particular, and so became an example of what I've termed "floating alignment." Given that in his debut Molecule Man Two has a weaker charisma than his father, he doesn't provide even a low-charisma crossover when intersecting with the stars of the team-up title, as would be the case whenever two or more team-up characters encountered a villain foreign to both of their mythoi. Here's a quick example of a valid low-charisma crossover, MARVEL TEAM-UP #22, in which another all-purpose villain, the living computer Quasimodo, tilts his lance against both Spider-Man and Hawkeye, neither of whom had met the villain before.

Next up: non-distinct replacements.

A CROSSOVER MISCELLANY PT. 1

The essays in this series will deal with general permutations of the practice of crossing over previously established characters.

I'm henceforth replacing the term "total template deviation," put forth in this essay, for the simpler term "derivatives." Derivatives may include not only faux versions of well-known fictional characters-- some named earlier being Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, and Captain America-- but also separate characters who in some other way ride on the coat-tails of an established fictional figure.

Now, when discussing the 1966 film BILLY THE KID VS. DRACULA in this essay, I called that version of Dracula a "strong template deviation" because the character strongly deviated from the depiction of the king-vampire in the original source material. However, the same producers who came out with BILLY also inflicted upon the world JESSE-- that is, JESSE JAMES MEETS FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER, patently another crossbreed between western and horror film-tropes. 

Now, the latter-billed character in the film, Doctor Maria Frankenstein, certainly can't be called a "total template deviation" with relation to the original Mary Shelley Frankenstein, because she's supposed to be the mad scientist's equally mad daughter. But she is derived, very loosely, from the history of the original character, and so that makes her in my book a "derivative." The same holds true for the "Frankenstein" creature who appears in the 1965 FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE SPACE MONSTER, who is only likened to the Shelley monster by the title of the film. The l965 film would not be a crossover, but JESSE would be at least a "low-charisma" crossover, because both title characters are only loosed related to their supposed originals.

Moving to a somewhat higher level of filmmaking, the word "derivative" also applies to the 1936 film DRACULA'S  DAUGHTER. The titular monster, Countess Zaleska, is not mentioned in the 1931 film DRACULA, to which DAUGHTER is theoretically a sequel, nor is there any sort of reference to any such offspring in the pages of Bram Stoker's novel. 

Further complicating the 1936 film is that, because it follows fast on the heels of the events of the 1931 film, Dracula-- or rather, his staked corpse-- does appear briefly in DAUGHTER. Is the film a crossover between the new character and the old one? But no, I determined that being a dead body in a given work carries no more crossover-potential than had Dracula merely been referred to, or shown in a flashback. Now, had Dracula been walking around doing something for a few minutes, I might have at least deemed the 1936 film a "low-charisma" crossover, based on the brevity of the vampire-lord's appearance. But in the absence of any "real-time" activity, DAUGHTER is a derivative but not a crossover.

The idea of having one character appear just long enough to introduce a newer one has precedent in a film like the 1972 BLACULA. In this movie's opening scenes, the original Dracula is around for ten minutes or so at the outset, talking turkey with Prince Mamuwalde. Then the vampire decides to make the African prince into an undead creature, sticks the newly vampirized unfortunate into a tomb for the next seven decades, and even gives the neo-vamp a sarcastic version of Drac's iconic name. During the main action of the film, when Blacula revives in the early 1970s, the Count does not reappear, nor is he mentioned again. To the extent that any viewer thinks about the matter, said viewer probably assumes that the racist vamp gets knocked off some time before Blacula revives in 1972. But because Dracula is such a major fictional figure, BLACULA (but not SCREAM, BLACULA, SCREAM) is a crossover-- though again, a very low-charisma type, since the iconic vamp makes only a token appearance.

More to come.

THE READING RHEUM: TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE (1929)

 

SPOILERS (for a novel printed back in 1929, HAH)

Within two years in the early nineteen-teens, Edgar Rice Burroughs had authored what most of his fans regard as his three seminal serial concepts: TARZAN and JOHN CARTER OF MARS in 1912, and the PELLUCIDAR series, beginning with AT THE EARTH'S CORE, in 1914. Roughly fifteen years later, ERB then made an ambitious attempt to correlate all three concepts within a series of novels written from 1929 to 1930. Slightly later, he also provided a link to his "Venus" books, which are usually regarded as a concept distinctly inferior to the other three. This didn't happen until 1932, so it was probably just an afterthought for ERB.

AT THE EARTH'S CORE, like other books in the ERB canon, opens with the conceit that its narrative-- the story of how David Innes and his colleague Abner Perry found a huge primitive environment at the center of the earth-- is actually a true story related by Innes to Burroughs himself. However, for the crossover project ERB decided to create a fictional character, Jason Gridley, to serve as a linking element between his disparate fictional worlds. In two crossover novels, radio-technician Gridley is just an onlooker. First, in TANAR OF PELLUCIDAR (the third in that series, and the first to center on a hero other than David Innes), Gridley uses his advanced radio to receive a transmission from Abner Perry, which tells the story of the titular Tanar and his adventure. Later, Gridley also receives a similar transmission from Mars, which allows him to relate the story of 1930's A FIGHTING MAN OF MARS, the seventh of the "Mars" series, but there too Gridley merely relays information. 

The TANAR narrative ends with the revelation that Innes has been imprisoned by evildoers, so Gridley makes the promise to come to Innes' rescue. The story of the rescue-mission makes up the narrative of TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE. Gridley seeks out Tarzan in his African jungle and convinces the ape-man to help save Innes, even though neither Gridley nor Tarzan has ever encountered the Pellucidaran adventurer. Tarzan uses his personal wealth and contacts with some characters from an earlier TARZAN novel to bring about the construction of a unique dirigible, with which the heroes plan to journey to the earth's core via a polar entranceway. Most of the technicians manning the dirigible are Germans, which may be ERB channeling memories of the German use of zeppelins in World War One. Tarzan also brings along a small group of his Waziri warriors and an American Negro cook (more on whom later).

Anyone hoping for a major encounter between two of ERB's creations, Tarzan and David Innes, is doomed to disappointment. Innes is not rescued until CORE's final pages, and the character rates only a couple of paragraphs-- which is more than we see for other Pellucidaran support-characters (including the aforementioned "Tanar"), who get the equivalent of footnotes. The only substantive crossover is the one between the hero Tarzan and the setting of Pellucidar. Since the latter is not the star of the Pellucidaran novels, CORE is in essence what I've called in this essay a "high-charisma crossover," since only one of the crossover-presences possesses centric stature. 

Gridley, though he debuts in a Pellucidar novel, is only weakly correlated with the Pellucidar mythos, and even less so with the Mars series. He's allowed to shine as a secondary, support-cast hero in CORE for reasons of romance. ERB always worked a romantic subplot into his adventure-stories, and since Tarzan like David Innes had already become "an old married man," Gridley was elected to play the role of the Earnest Young Man who completes a romance-arc with a comely savage girl of Pellucidar, the amply-named Jana, Red Flower of Zoram.

The structure of CORE amounts to a series of search-and-rescue missions. Both Tarzan and Gridley get separated from the crew of the dirigible, so that both are able to pursue distinct story-arcs. Tarzan gets stuck with the non-erotic duty of befriending some of Pellucidar's noble warriors-- a gorilla-man and the brother of Jana-- while Gridley saves the lissome Jana from both human and animal marauders. Love is swiftly kindled between Gridley and the primitive naif, but like one of ERB's earlier heroes, Billings of the 1918 PEOPLE THAT TIME FORGOT, the civilized Gridley becomes a trifle snobbish in the presence of the uneducated girl. Jana, possessing the full array of feminine intuitions, senses his diffidence and "catches him by running away." This strategy leads to more arduous treks and more battles with the denizens, animal and human, of Pellucidar. Thus both Gridley and Tarzan burn up most of the book's continuity until all the good-guy protagonists are united so as to bring about the anti-climactic rescue of David Innes and the plighting of troths between Gridley and Jana.

Gridley is little more than a stereotypical earnest adventurer, the image of the reader's identificatory figure. Jana is slightly more complex. Her fulsome nickname establishes both that she's beautiful and she knows it, but unlike many of ERB's savage heroines Jana can at least attempt to defend herself, using a spear to slay a primitive hyenadon, much like the character of Meriem in THE SON OF TARZAN. She's extremely proud and doesn't allow Gridley the luxury of pretending that they're "just friends," and her determination to make him confess his feelings in spite of his upbringing drives the romantic subplot. As for other characters, Tarzan is just Tarzan, though as in earlier novels he tends to shift into an animal-like affinity with the natural world whenever that suits ERB's purposes. The rest of the support-characters, good and bad, are all stock figures, though the Negro cook Robert Jones requires a little extra comment. It may be that the commercial reprint of CORE I read expunged some "pickaninny" humor, for Jones doesn't really do much in the story, though he does speak in the mushmouthed Southern dialect usually reserved for Negro characters. His backstory is curious. Though he was captured in Germany while serving as a cook for the American forces during World War One, Jones got along well enough with his captors that he never went back to America and simply continued working for German employers until being hired for the dirigible-adventure. The temptation is to believe that Jones is one of ERB's "cheerful Negroes," though at least he's never as pusillanimous as the maid Esmerelda from TARZAN OF THE APES. 

Yet just as Esmerelda was unfavorably contrasted with the noble Black Africans of the first Tarzan novel, it may be that Jones is meant to be an unfavorable contrast with the fighting Waziris on the expedition, who are clearly shown to be capable of learning the operation of the dirigible from the German crew. This interpretation would cohere with ERB's overall program of critiquing civilized life in contrast to the lives of noble savages, a prevailing theme in the majority of the author's works. CORE is full of such trenchant observations, most often lobbed against pampered Europeans, and even against the American Gridley and his circle of friends. Because Pellucidar is a place where the perception of time is somewhat erratic, ERB also scores some points against the workaday world experienced by his readers, the world of punching time-clocks and societal demands. 

Of course, it must be said that ERB's critique of modernity is a shallow one, rooted in the escapism of noble savages who are just wholly good or wholly bad. ERB actually seems less interested in the Pellucidaran people than in the multifarious prehistoric animals. ERB gives a lot of attention to describing all the exotic biological features of the fauna: cave-bears, pterodactyls, even a quasi-stegosaur capable of limited glider-flight. There are also a few animal-human hybrids, such as the aforementioned gorilla-men, the Sagoths, and reptile-men, the Horibs, the latter proving to be among ERB's best villains. ERB fills these descriptions with considerable verve and thus gives Tarzan one of his best settings for adventure.

On a minor note, the novel ends with one member of the dirigible-crew still missing, but this contrivance takes place simply to set up that character's own debut as a starring hero in the 1937 Pellucidar book BACK TO THE STONE AGE, also a very minor crossover since David Innes makes a token appearance therein. Gridley did not appear in this story, but he has another introductory role in the 1932 PIRATES OF VENUS, the first in the "Carson Napier of Venus" series. 

ERB didn't seem to pursue crossovers much after this period from 1929 to 1932. But TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE is certainly the best of his crossover works, as well as one of the best of the Tarzan novels.

MYTHCOMICS: CARNIVORA (1994)

 

Some time back the Italian album-series DRUUNA was recommended to me, and I finally found time to read the series, this time on COMIC ONLINE FREE.COM. 

My first thought is that it would have been easy to read the albums out of order, because creator Paolo Serpieri wasn't especially concerned with inter-album continuity. While keeping in mind that the literary term "picaresque" may have been misused in many instances, the adventures of the titular heroine Druuna would seem to conform to that model. That model focuses on the wanderings of unattached protagonists seeking to make their way in the world, whether by hook or by crook-- often crook, since the genre takes its name from the Spanish word "picaro," meaning a rogue who lives by his (or her) wits. Female protagonists may tend to be somewhat more innocent as they flee the attentions of lustful predators; some can be fairly called rogues, like Defoe's Moll Flanders, while others exist to be repeatedly attacked and abused, like the 1965 parody-character Phoebe Zeitgeist.  Serpieri's Drunna follows the latter model, and like Phoebe she spends an inordinate amount of time being stripped of her clothing and being subjected to numerous indignities-- though unlike Phoebe, Drunna seems to be able to "relax and enjoy it," even though she doesn't seem to be a syndromic masochist.

I found Volume 4, CARNIVORA, to be the volume that most succeeds in assigning a psychological mythicity to Drunna's circumlocutions-- a psychology that I associate with the nightmarish conviction that one can never know where reality begins and dream ends. To the extent that continuity matters, earlier volumes established that Drunna originally occupied a space-faring generation starship, though like most of the ship's occupants, she thought she lived on a regular planet, specifically a city infected by a devastating plague. By the time of CARNIVORA, Drunna has been taken aboard another starship, but everyone aboard this ship is aware that they are descendants of a devastated Earth, and that they are searching for a new planet to colonize. Druuna becomes a chess-pawn to various parties aboard the ship, sometimes being used for sex, sometimes as a means to fight against a tyrannical computer-intelligence. But whatever victories Druuna achieves in earlier volumes are abolished here, in a recursive world where, as the Einstein-looking scientist above says, dreams and reality can become confused.

The POV shifts from the scientist to that of Druuna herself, imagining herself back in the plague-city. She experiences the possible hallucination of being murdered by weird surgeons, then awakes in a bedchamber unharmed, where she meditates on her unexplained pregnancy (which is also apparently an illusion) and on "the perverse pleasure of waiting, that strange obscene desire." A strange man enters the room and abuses her, after which his phantom-like associates gather to cheer him on. 

But then Druuna finds herself back on the starship, awakening from the first of many demonstrable dreams. The ship's computer addresses her, and she learns that Shastar, her deceased lover from the plague-city, has had his consciousness merged with that of the computer. She meets Terry, a female crewperson, who informs her that many of the other inhabitants have been devoured by a carnivorous alien intruder (presumably the "carnivora" of the title). The creature imprisons its victims in membranous webs, but Terry avers that these crewpersons are as good as dead. 

Then Terry's supposed identity goes out the porthole. Two crewpersons appear and shoot her, revealing that she's a "replicant," a copy of the original female created by the invader. Druuna, though not a fighter by nature, kills the monster born from phony-Terry's guts with a weapon, saving the life of one crewman. The other crewperson, the real Terry, regards Druuna as another possible menace. She divests Druuna of her few clothes and chains her up in a room where some of the ship's degraded inhabitants, "the prolets," swarm forth to manhandle the bare-assed heroine.

While Druuna suffers the fate of the perdurable female, the captain of the ship, known as "Will," is seen on his own, meditating on the oppressiveness of  the universe. Druuna, or a replicant thereof, joins him. He has sex with false-Druuna a couple of times, but it doesn't do anything to lessen his mordant musings on the relativity of time. Awakening from post-coital sleep, he finds Druuna missing. Will wanders about looking for her, has a dialogue with an unnamed crewman imprisoned in the alien's webbing, and then finds fake Druuna-- and also fake Will, a replicant of himself. 

Meanwhile, real Druuna seems to awake, no longer tied up as she was before. However, this awakening is yet another engineered dream, as she converses with a hologram of dead lover Shastar. The hologram gives Druuna such helpful information as "Beyond this wall the universe is reflected upside down and time is inverted." Shastar tells Druuna to communicate the ship's peril to the crew, since the captain's been destroyed by the alien beasts. Then she awakes for real (or as real as things get here), though she finds that her assailants have apparently left her unbound and the door to the chamber open. She finds another crewman dead, while not far away, Terry encounters the false Druuna.

Perhaps because more crewpeople have died, Terry doesn't go off half-cocked this time, but this only permits Fake Druuna to accuse Real Druuna of being the alien copy. After tricking Terry into shooting Druuna, albeit non-fatally, the replicant summons one of its beastly allies to overpower Terry, who takes her own life so as to avoid becoming a hors d'oeuvre.

The ship's doctor finds the wounded Druuna and barricades the two of them in the computer-room. The doc pulls a sheet over Druuna's head, since she's apparently died, while outside the replicants order him to let them in, for they are true life and he is only "death and negation." Doc blows up the ship, but his consciousness is propelled into his own past. Then he somehow fast-forwards to a period before the ship ventured near the aliens' domain, and he talks the captain into reversing course. Druuna is alive again, but the doc can't help wondering if he actually succeeded, or if everyone he's encountered might be a fiendish copy of the real Earthpeople.

If TWELVE MONKEYS hadn't come out one year later than CARNIVORA, I would have said that this story was something of a cross between that mind-bending time-travel flick and 1982's THE THING. Druuna's sexcapades play a somewhat less direct role in the narrative here in comparison to other installments. However, it did occur to me that the recursive nature of dreams and illusions throughout CARNIVORA might be profitably compared to the ecstatic (and repetitive) nature of human sexuality, which also have, however briefly, the effect of abolishing the participants' consciousness of commonplace reality. In the end, though the reader can go on to witness more adventures of the picaresque heroine, those narratives also continue to de-center both Druuna and her world so that the idea of a shared reality seems as illusory as the dream of Chaung Tzu.

NULL-MYTHS: “WONDER GIRL’S STOLEN FACE” (WONDER WOMAN #153, 1965)

 

Despite Robert Kanigher’s considerable creativity, I’ve yet to see anything he wrote for the WONDER WOMAN feature—which he wrote and edited for over fifteen years—that qualified as a mythcomic. His use of myth-ideas was both derivative and desultory, giving one the impression that he could barely summon any enthusiasm for the series, even when dealing with characters he himself created, or at least substantially re-worked, like the idea of “Wonder Woman as a girl,” as I discussed here.

All that said, Kanigher gets a little closer to the mythic mark with the 1965 story “Wonder Girl’s Stolen Face,” though it’s such a jumbled mess that it only qualifies as a “null-myth.” Strangely, in other venues Kanigher seemed to be a fan of “strong women,” since he had created such DC Comics characters as Black Canary, Poison Ivy and Mademoiselle Marie. But the closest he comes to expatiating on a feminine theme in a WONDER WOMAN comic is the old saw about women being ruled by their vanity.

“Face” begins by showing Wonder Girl (a teenaged version of Wonder Woman, who could co-exist with her older self via a complicated time-trick) being celebrated by both her immediate family on Paradise Island, and by two young swains pursuing her: Mer-Boy, a half-fish merman who dwells in the ocean with his kindred, and Bird-Boy, who lives in the sky with his fellow bird-folk. But the teen Amazon’s good cheer is sabotaged by a longtime WONDER WOMAN villain, the alien Duke of Deception, who wants the entire Wonder-family eliminated so that he can invade Earth with his flying saucers. He decides to sow the seeds of dissension by depriving Wonder Girl of her normal good looks and making her into a monster embittered against society and her family.

Sure enough, the first part of the Duke’s plan works fine. At the very moment when Wonder Girl’s two beaus are singing praises for her Cleopatra-like beauty, the ray literally steals the heroine’s face—we know this because we see the disembodied face later on-- and replaces it with a half-human, half-gargoyle physiognomy. Upon finding herself transformed, does the teenager rush off to Paradise Island, to have her mother and the Amazon scientists examine her? No, she raves at her boyfriends for being taken aback by her face-lift, even though neither of them forswears her for her sudden hideousness. In fact, each in turn invites the gargoyle girl to attend functions in their respective domains, trying to buoy up her spirits. However, at both functions the mer-people and the bird-people both think Wonder Girl is putting them on with her horrific visage, and they laugh at her. In both domains the angry Amazon tears up a lot of real estate and flees back to her family’s island. However, the other members of the WW family-- Wonder Woman herself, her mother Hippolyta and Wonder Tot (don’t ask!) -- make the exact same mistake, with the result that once again the tormented teen tears things up and fights with her family.

This of course is just what the Duke wanted. However, the other members of the family refuse to strike Wonder Girl. This bit of charity clears some of the rage from the heroine’s mind, and instead of attacking further, she flies off, intending to exile herself (still with no reason to know that the transformation is permanent). The frustrated alien traps Wonder Girl, planning to draw the other Wonders into an ambush. The teen’s innate heroism asserts itself, and she wins free in time to give warning—after which the four fighting females demolish the Duke’s invasion force. From one of the destroyed saucers Wonder Woman saves her younger self’s stolen face—it really does look like just a disembodied face, of course—and later Amazon science manage to get rid of the gargoyle-visage and restore to Wonder Girl her normal cuteness, as well as returning everything to the status quo.

The best part of this story is not the villain’s predictable plot, but the wacky lengths to which Kanigher goes to justify the Duke’s face-swapping technology. In a monologue spoken for the reader’s benefit, the deceptive demon claims that he performed this perfidious act twice before on two famous icons: mythology’s Medusa and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Doctor Jekyll. I feel reasonably sure that the original story of Medusa—a beautiful mortal woman, whom a god transformed into a snake-haired horror—was probably the main inspiration for “Face,” and aside from the Duke’s participation, the Medusa story hews close to the original story’s outlines. However, the revision of Stevenson’s Doctor Jekyll narrative is a classic example of an author playing the part of Procrustes, the manic innkeeper of myth who cut off his victims’ limbs so that they would fit on a bed. According to Kanigher, Jekyll wasn’t transformed into Hyde by his experimental potion as Stevenson claimed, but by the Duke replacing Jekyll’s normal face with a monstrous physiognomy. It’s of minor interest that the transformed Wonder Girl acts more like Hyde than like Medusa, which may be the only reason that Kanigher bothered to rewrite Stevenson. Further, it may be revealing that the Duke says he struck at Medusa and Jekyll out of envy for their accolades. Maybe the real reason Kanigher rewrote those classic stories was also out of envy, albeit of the authorial kind…

A SERIES OF UN-UDDERABLE EVENTS

 

The “events” to which my title refers are all the 1959-1966 appearances of DC Comics’ original “Wonder Girl” character, whose name I will henceforth abbreviate to “WG1.” Prior to 1959, the WONDER WOMAN continuity had made loose references to the idea that the heroine had passed from childhood to adulthood on Paradise Island before taking on her costumed mantle. However, in no previous period was a younger version of Wonder Woman a frequent element of the series. But in WONDER WOMAN #105, dated April 1959, writer/editor Robert Kanigher and artist Ross Andru began making repeated use of a teenaged version of the heroine, much as the feature SUPERBOY told stories of Superman when he was a youth. WG1’s adventures were sometimes featured on WONDER WOMAN covers, while at other times the teen Amazon was just a backup to her better-established older self. Not a lot of fans, even back in The Day, were especially fond of the character, though ironically WG1 indirectly spawned DC’s second Wonder Girl iteration, and that character enjoyed considerable cachet in the TEEN TITANS series-- more on which later.

Many fans, then, would have deemed WG1 an unfortunate result of editor Kanigher’s tendency to write down to the readers of WONDER WOMAN. But it only recently dawned on me that WG1 was also “un-udderable,” in a way I can only express in song:

No boobs at all,

No boobs at all,

Double-U Gee-One

Had no boobs at all!

(Approximate melody based on a song about Fawcett’s Captain Marvel, who was said to have no “balls” at all.)

While looking through one of the WG1 stories, a question occurred to me. If one presumes that Kanigher began writing stories of a teenaged Amazon, logic would dictate that he was doing so to improve sales. Movies about the new breed of American called the “teenager” had proliferated in the middle 1950s. Such films varied between stories about “clean teens” or about adolescents with somewhat raunchier proclivities. But all teen movies dealt with youths over fifteen, meaning that the female teenagers no longer looked like kids. However, WG1, despite being called a teen, always looked significantly undeveloped.

The WG1 stories do not explicitly state how old the young Amazon is. Yet in all the character’s appearances, she goes around clothed in a very loose tunic, whether it’s some Graeco-Roman garment or a version of the famous Wonder Woman costume. Since the mature Wonder Woman was reasonably well endowed, the logical conclusion is that the creators of WG1 meant to imply that the character was too young to have significant breastitude. If Kanigher was at all consistent about deeming WG1 a teenager, the youngest she could be would be thirteen, and for some individuals this can be too young for full development.

Of course, though WG1 was not technically a kid sidekick, I believe most if not all “young allies” of older superheroes were supposed to be in this same age-range. Michael Fleischer’s ENCYCLOPEDIA OF BATMAN offers evidence that Robin the Boy Wonder was supposed to be a perpetual thirteen or fourteen before he finally started aging in the late 1960s, and most boy sidekicks looked no older than Robin. Prior to WG1, there were few teenaged superheroines in comics, and the only long-lived one was Fawcett Comics’ Mary Marvel, sister of the aforementioned Captain Marvel. Mary’s age probably wasn’t stated either, but on the whole, her figure also suggested the appearance of a girl who had just recently passed into adolescence. All this circumstantial evidence suggests that the raconteurs who worked on Golden Age superheroes were convinced, probably not without merit, that most of their readers were pre-teens, and that the only ages they wanted to see represented were either (1) kids of middle school age or (2) adults, the latter embodying the fantasy of attaining temporal power. That’s also probably one reason that Kanigher decided to devote space to stories of a thirteen-year-old Amazon. The baggy clothing may have been calculated to dodge any question of the not-yet-budding youth being exploited, since a reader couldn’t even tell if she had breasts.

Of course, if you lived back in the 1950s and listened to the Abominable Doctor Wertham, all comics in all genres were replete with what the psycho psychiatrist called “headlights.” There can be little doubt that a few superheroines were especially well endowed, particularly some versions of the Phantom Lady. But most of the genres that accentuated the positive power of cleavage were those of crime, jungle-adventure, and teen-humor—the last being the only genre in which developed female teens regularly put their goods on display.

I doubt that during the middle 1950s the very conservative DC company had to clean up very much in the boobage department. Before the Code, the potential lubricity of Wonder Woman’s costume was restrained by the quasi-Classical art of H.G. Peter. After the Code, Andru and others tended to draw her as being a bit on the slender side. Most regular female characters—Lois Lane and Lana Lang (in the SUPERBOY feature) -- sported modest cleavage, while Catwoman, one of the few well-endowed DC femmes, found herself placed in exile for having drawn the wrath of Wertham. One character, Saturn Girl of the Legion of Super-Heroes, made her first appearance as a supporting character in a 1958 SUPERBOY story, and in that story she barely appears to have any tits at all. However, once the idea of the Legion earned some plaudits from the readers, Saturn Girl’s second appearance gave her a better costume and cleavage about the same as that of Lois and Lana. But then, she, unlike WG1, was supposed to be at least fifteen. On a side-note, though the lady Legionnaire’s first appearance predates that of Kanigher’s WG1, neither Saturn Girl nor any of her compatriots appeared in a regular feature until 1962.

In any case, there’s some irony in the fact that WG1 was the first teen heroine of the 1950s to appear on a semi-regular basis, for she only appeared on newsstands about a month ahead of ACTION COMICS #252, dated May 1959. The first version of Supergirl is explicitly said to be fifteen, a topic which comes up when she auditions to join the Legion of Super-Heroes. (In a twist typical of the period, the heroine washes out when she temporarily becomes an adult and violates the group’s “no one over 18” rule.) More relevantly, from the first Supergirl, unlike WG1, did have fully developed knockers, and though they probably weren’t any bigger than Lois Lane’s, the girl’s girls got a little more emphasis because of the “S” emblem she wore on her chest.

As for WG1, Kanigher had her making references to teenaged pursuits like dancing, dating, and listening to “platters.” But she was always a pale shadow of her older self, in contrast to Superboy, whose small-town background gave him a little distinction from his mature persona. So, in 1966, fading sales on WONDER WOMAN impelled Kanigher to make a show of dumping WG1 and many other wacky creations out of the comic. The gesture didn’t prevent the writer-editor from losing his access to the venerable Amazon property. Yet just as WG1 was being knocked off, her sort-of doppelganger, Wonder Girl II, debuted in TEEN TITANS.

In the first appearance of the TITANS, three kid sidekicks—Robin, Kid Flash, and Aqualad—assembled to fight a menace. Writer Bob Haney and artist Bruno Premiani made them all look like they were in the thirteen-year range, but this didn’t last long. In the group’s second appearance, WG2—who was never decisively stated to share the complicated origins of WG1—joined the group, and remained a member for the series’ initial run, and later revivals as well. Yet from WG2’s debut in the TITANS title, the artist did not follow Kanigher’s lead in terms of putting WG2 in a baggy toga. Instead she wore a version of Wonder Woman’s costume that conformed to the contours of her body. Naturally, the new character began with the same modest breasts of other DC heroines. But unlike her predecessor, her costume was tight enough to demonstrate that at least she HAD boobs.

By the end of the sixties, WG2, like both Wonder Woman and Supergirl, became better endowed. Further, Catwoman returned to the comics, and some new characters were breast-monsters from the first, like the Barbara Gordon Batgirl and the vampy Legionnaire Dream Girl. All of which just proves the non-existent adage, “You can’t keep a good--” …no, I just can’t say it. I invite my few readers to write their own bad pun.

CROSSOVERS VS. MASHUPS

 In this essay I wrote:

MONSTERS VS. ALIENS does not qualify as any kind of crossover, though it is a "mashup," in which diverse characters with some similar aspects but also with different backgrounds are jammed together in one narrative. It might be fairly argued that all crossovers may be called mashups, but that all mashups are not crossovers.

I'm not going to advance a "theory of mashups" to go with the crossover-theory advanced in the CONVOCATION series. But for the purpose of this essay, I'll formulate a rough definition: that, unlike crossovers, mashups don't always have to feature at least one character with some established story-history. For instance, the cited example, MONSTERS VS. ALIENS, is a monster-mashup even though all four of the starring monsters appear for the first time in the movie. But it's not a monster-crossover because none of the featured characters had any established history in a previous narrative.

I reviewed the two WAXWORK films back in December 2014, but that was long before I was thinking much about crossover-theory. Whereas the heroes of MONSTERS VS. ALIENS only indirectly reference the movie-characters on which they're based, both WAXWORK films provide various incarnations of "famous monsters of filmland." What's interesting is that some of the incarnations are very generic, and would hardly count in a mashup except for the sheer diversity of their types, while a comparative few are specific enough in their references that they could be considered at least high-charisma crossovers.

In the first WAXWORK, the protagonists are menaced by assorted doppelgangers of evil entities. Two segments are devoted to generic versions of a werewolf and a mummy, and there's a climactic fight-scene in which the good guys contend with a small army of freaks, also mostly generic like zombies and vampires, though there are some very loose visual references to figures like The Invisible Man and Audrey II of LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS. Yet there are two extended sequences devoted to the protagonists contending with both the canonical Dracula and a very fictionalized version of the Marquis de Sade-- both of whom count as "monsters" in my system. So by the terms I've used earlier, WAXWORK qualifies as a "high-charisma" crossover, even though none of the evil entities are "real."

The second WAXWORK, which includes a markedly different origin for the doppelgangers, also includes lots of generic types: more zombies (with an obvious hat-tip to DAWN OF THE DEAD), a disembodied hand, various aliens (including The Aliens), and a "ghost girl" possibly patterned on the spirit from THE HAUNTING. However, this time the "high-charisma" entities include versions of Doctor Frankenstein and his Monster, Mister Hyde, Jack the Ripper, Godzilla, Nosferatu, and a sorcerer based on the villain from Roger Corman's 1965 film THE RAVEN. To be sure, the sorcerer fits the persona of a "villain" rather than a "monster," but the others all register as monstrous presences, even though all of them, except for Frankenstein and his creation, only appear for a minute or so. 

Still, it's not hard to imagine the WAXWORK concept being done with no strong references to any established characters. Had this been done, the movies would not be crossovers, only mashups, like the one seen in the Mexican kiddie-film TOM THUMB AND LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD-- though that film is a "hero-crossover" because of the teamup of the titular fairy-tale protagonists.